Let’s give these cuckoo ideas a reality check.Photo: Jeremy Brooks

It’s not pretty when several irrational ideas collide. On May 12, the Senate conducted a hearing to discuss the removal of a $2 billion per year tax break for the top five oil companies. The New York Times called the testimony at the hearing “a big whine for big oil.” Eliminating a tax break like this should be a no-brainer, but that idea is blocked by six irrational notions from the right that come together in an explosion of false logic:

1. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) claims that “unsustainable debt and deficits threaten the prosperity of our children and the health and retirement security of our seniors,” but yet …
2. Stopping a tax increase, no matter what kind of tax, is economic priority No. 1. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said that “all this hearing is about is providing a justification for tax increases.”
3. The conservative media pundits argue that an increase in taxes paid by the hugely profitable oil companies would raise the price of oil. So …
4. For many conservatives, the answer to our oil problem is “drill, baby, drill,” the implication being that drilling for more oil within the U.S. would lead to lower gas prices. Therefore …
5. If we drill for more oil, we’ll find oceans of it! The right-wing pundits say that we have enough oil to live happily ever after. If you need more of something, it will magically appear. And finally …
6. If we don’t get oil prices down, civilization will collapse because civilization is not possible without oil.

Let’s give these ideas a reality check.

First, as many at the Roosevelt Institute have argued, fiscal deficits are not the biggest problem we face right now. Our priority ought to be digging ourselves out of the hole that the global financial industry has placed us in. Many countries currently have deficits much bigger than ours, and the U.S. has had much bigger ones in its history. And in any case, the way to address a huge deficit is to follow smart fiscal policies that focus on reigniting the economic growth engine that then creates enough jobs to provide the revenues the government needs. Sort of like what FDR did in the Depression.

That leads us to irrational idea No. 2: that you can’t raise taxes for anybody, especially not Big Business and billionaires. In reality, one way to reignite economic growth is to take economic resources from those who have them and aren’t using them particularly wisely — like the oil companies, financial industry, and wealthy top 1 percent of the population — and use them to invest in things that rebuild the economy, infrastructure, a decent school system, or a manufacturing economy. Tax increases are a very bad thing in a recession for the bottom 90 percent or so of the population because they would dampen spending, which makes economic activity decline even further. But as Keynes showed in his classic book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the rich don’t tend to spend as much of their money as the rest of us (their marginal rate of consumption is lower), and their lack of spending makes things worse in an economic downturn. So tax increases for the top of the economic pyramid is a good idea.

Which leads us to the wacky world of oil. The notion that denying an oil company a few billion in profits would lead to a rise in prices is demonstrably wrong, as the Congressional Research Service has proven. But worse is the idea that drilling for a few billion more barrels in the United States’ already depleted oil zones would have much of an effect on prices. If you manage to increase the amount of oil produced in the U.S., most of that oil will actually go to other countries because the oil market is global. The U.S. uses about 21 percent of the world’s oil supply and produces about 8 percent. This means that we can’t buy our oil in some fantasy America-only market. (See figures from the BP Energy Review [PDF].) In fact, if you want to increase the supply of oil, you might want to, say, help the Iraqis fix their oil infrastructure (alas, we’ve already wasted hundreds of billions on a war over there). Bottom line: the U.S. has become a small player on the global oil scene because it has already used up most of its oil — it only has about 2 percent of the world’s proven reserves.

Moving on to the next irrational idea conservatives are pushing, we come to the belief that somehow oil is forever, like diamonds. Well, petroleum is a finite resource, created over 100 million years ago, and is not replenishable. According to quite a few well-versed scholars and engineers, we have hit the halfway point in our siphoning of the global oil tank. This theory of peak oil was initially explained by the renowned oil engineer, M. King Hubbert, who predicted in 1956 that the U.S. would peak in oil output in 1970, which turned out to be accurate. He then predicted that global oil output would peak in 2000. And guess what? Global oil output, at least of the easy, cheap oil, peaked in about 2005.

But this message doesn’t seem to get through on the right. Since the decline and eventual end of the use of oil would lead to a shift from our car-centered, single-family-home-and-mall-centered lifestyle, the usual reaction to the idea of peak oil has been to stick one’s head in the sand. Many people simply can’t imagine a world that doesn’t run on oil. But we are innovative creatures and we could take up the challenge of building a different kind of society. For instance, I have argued that we can have a completely electric transportation system — and transportation accounts for about three-quarters of all oil use!

Since conservatives tend to do well in suburbs and in the South — and suburbs and the South run on oil — the Republican party will not even countenance the possibility of less oil being available for all of our cars, trucks, and planes. (Not that the Democrats are much better, but at least some of them support electric rail.) And so it seems that a perfectly rational idea — eliminating a tax deduction for oil companies swimming in profits they can’t use — doesn’t seem to have a chance in Congress. Why? Because according to conservatives, the deficit will destroy the economy; taxes will destroy the economy by bringing higher gas prices; drilling more is the only way to bring down prices; there will always be more oil; and if there isn’t more oil … the economy will really be destroyed. Ka-boom!

And there you have it: the sound of the collision of a half dozen irrational arguments.

Bob Herbert.Photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times

Dear Mr. Herbert,

I was sad to hear that you will no longer be writing for the op-ed page of the New York Times. Your critical perspective on the class war being waged against the middle and working class and the poor, on the waste and recklessness of our wars, and on the wrenching struggles of ordinary Americans made you an invaluable voice. But I want to suggest that even more important than those insights was your consistent attempts to point to a better future, and the path to getting there, by rebuilding our infrastructure. I hope that in your forthcoming book you make that effort a substantial part of your argument.

For instance, back in 2009 you declared that “America has to be rebuilt, modernized and re-energized — from its water and sewer systems to its schools to the smart grid and the alternative energy sources that so many are talking about and beyond. That’s where the jobs are for the long term, and that’s the only route to a truly flourishing future.” You went on to say that “These investments would be costly and require vision.”

Well, you can’t single-handedly pay for the cost, but you have started to create the vision: “Imagine … an America with rebuilt, healthy, dynamic metropolitan areas, and gleaming new port facilities, and networks of high-speed rail, an America with electric vehicles and a smart grid and energy generated by the power of the sun and wind and water and the ocean’s waves. Imagine if the children of today’s toddlers had access to world-class public schools all across the nation and a higher education system that is both first-rate and affordable.”

I submit to you that the ills that you so eloquently address will not be healed without a clear vision, one based on a new, sustainable, job-creating infrastructure. Maybe the word “infrastructure” doesn’t stir the soul; Rachel Maddow tries, but she seems to have a wistful look on her face, as if to say — and she sometimes admits — “I wish I could make the infrastructure more interesting for you.” Now, to me it’s fascinating, but apparently I am in the small minority. However, I think that part of the attraction of discussing high-speed rail or networks of wind farms or walkable neighborhoods is that they literally create an image in the reader’s or viewer’s head.

But there is an even deeper need for infrastructure renewal to which you have alluded, as when you wrote that “A long-term program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure … would create jobs and establish a sound industrial platform for 21st-century industries. The transformation to a greener economy needs to be accelerated, and most of the manufacturing associated with that newer, greener economy should take place in the United States.” As I argue in my book, Manufacturing Green Prosperity, the way to build a strong economy in the long-term is to rebuild the manufacturing sector, and the way to rebuild the manufacturing sector is to build an environmentally sustainable infrastructure. The two can be joined, hand in hand, if we create the right set of policies.

And as you point out, “Think of the returns the nation reaped from its investments in the interstate highway system, the Land Grant colleges, rural electrification, the Erie and Panama canals, the transcontinental railroad, the technology that led to the Internet, the Apollo program, the G.I. bill.” The government can and must be a force for good in society — that is, if the population has a choice of candidates who will do the right thing. You wrote of how China is moving full speed ahead, how John Kennedy used the presidency to create a vision of the future, of how first steps like an infrastructure bank can help lead to a needed turnaround.

Finally, I urge you to consider putting forth these principles as a first step in constructing a new kind of economics, as intimidating as that may sound. The ideas you are talking about are actually complementary to much of neoclassical economics, even if many economists might not see it that way. What conventional economists are not good at is what you, and others like you, are good at — understanding the need for good jobs for everyone, the role of a modern and well-maintained infrastructure, for a manufacturing base that can provide millions of jobs, and for a government that has a constructive role to play. These should be touchstones for, as you sum up in your last column, “expand[ing] my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society.” I wish you luck!

Anyone watching the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan can see: The human and ecological costs of nuclear power far outweigh those of any renewable energy.

On March 14, an editorial in The New York Times stated, “This page has endorsed nuclear power as one tool to head off global warming. We suspect that, when all the evidence is in from Japan, it will remain a valuable tool.” I want to argue that, to the contrary, the lesson to be learned from the catastrophe in Japan is that nuclear power is not even part of a sustainable solution to global warming. The whole idea behind preventing global warming is to protect the Earth’s ecosystems, collectively known as the biosphere. You can’t save the biosphere if it’s irradiated. The same problem rears its ugly head with most biofuels, certainly with corn ethanol; it won’t matter if the climate isn’t changing if the planet has been turned into one big desert because the soils and fresh water have been destroyed.

Speaking of water, the reactors that are melting down were supposed to be of a superior design, “light water” reactors, the “light” making it sound easier on the environment. But it turned out that unless you use (and abuse) prodigious amounts of circulating water, the whole system implodes. When the effects of global warming kick in and sea levels rise and erratic rainfall leads to unforeseen downpours or extended droughts, more sequences of rare events will lead to more nuclear power disasters.

Why is it worth potentially losing a region of a country, or even a whole country, just to generate electricity? What happens if a cloud of radiation heads for Tokyo, or moves into Korea? Why do we even have to worry about this?

I am not advocating the immediate closure of all nuclear power plants. All of the plants on or near earthquake faults, or on a coastline, should probably be considered for early retirement. I am advocating that no more nuclear power plants should be built.

Besides the painful facts of ongoing meltdowns, nuclear power plants don’t need to be built because truly renewable, or perhaps more descriptively, fuelless electricity technologies, like wind, are far superior to nuclear energy. The key to a sustainable energy supply is that there be no fuels. The fuels we currently use are oil, coal, gas, plant matter, and … uranium. The key characteristic about fuels is that we obtain energy from them by burning them, making them explode, letting them radiate — that is, they create great amounts of heat.

Now, burning a fuel is very attractive because you can obtain large amounts of energy. It’s easy to concentrate. The problem is that burning something is inherently dirty and wasteful. Electric power plants that use fuel waste about two-thirds of their energy, heat that simply dissipates into the environment. Think about that — the allegedly high-tech world of fossil fuels and nuclear power is wasting way over half of its fuel. The third problem with fuels is that they run out, as oil is starting to do.

Coal plants are very destructive to human health, certainly more on a day-by-day basis than nuclear plants, because of the mercury and other pollutants that go up the smokestack. And then, of course, there is the carbon dioxide. About 60 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions come from fossil fuels. The nuclear power industry also creates carbon emissions, because of all the mining, transportation, and construction surrounding its use. But it emits less carbon than do fossil fuels. The problem, clearly, is that every decade or so a significant part of the Earth’s surface is threatened with irradiation. Again, not a solution.

Wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro (water) energy of various sorts have no fuel. They convert a source of energy into electricity, using machinery. The source of energy is basically unlimited. There is no pollution or carbon dioxide (although classic hydropower, in the form of dams, can wreak havoc on ecosystems and emit carbon dioxide when organic matter putrefies in their artificial lakes). Although renewable energy technologies also waste most of the energy going through them, this waste is not in the form of heat.

Heat waste is what is destroying the nuclear power plants at Fukishima, and this phenomenon is the result of an overly complex system. Charles Perrow wrote a book called Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies way back in 1984. Recently, there has been a good deal of interesting work on the idea of resiliency, that is, the capacity of a system, whether an ecosystem or a society, to withstand mistakes or problems or failures (for example, see the book The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon). Resilient systems don’t produce as much as nonresilient, or brittle, systems, at least in the short term — but in the long-term, resilient systems are much more effective and useful because they don’t collapse. And when something collapses, like a nuclear reactor, at best it stops being useful and at worst it becomes extremely destructive.

Brittle systems can look more productive in the short-run, because often they are using themselves up and destroying their surrounding ecosystems in the process. Another way to look at it is that they are capital-destroying. For instance, agriculture can achieve fantastic levels of output for a while, but it can destroy the soil and water on which it depends, as shown by David Montgomery in his book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.

In the case of nuclear power, in the long-term, there is probably nothing more expensive, because the nuclear waste — such as the “spent fuel rods” that at the time of this writing are burning and spewing radioactive gas – has to be taken care of for hundreds or even thousands of years. And then there is the occasional country or region that is destroyed. And uranium mining does the same thing, at a smaller scale. That is, if the costs of nuclear power are averaged over a few thousand years, it will turn out to be the most expensive energy ever produced.

You may see erudite and sophisticated debates about whether wind, nuclear, or coal are more expensive in terms of kilowatts of electricity or kilowatt hours. But these costs can never include the cost of a collapse of a country, region, or entire civilization.

The ultimate irony of nuclear power may be that it is totally dependent on government intervention in the economy, and yet conservative Republicans are its greatest boosters. Because it can destroy whole regions, only the government has the capacity to clean up the mess, not private insurance companies. When it comes to energy, Republicans are hardcore socialists. They advocate for subsidies for fossil fuel companies, for the use of the military to protect oil trading lanes and oil deposits, for insurance for nuclear power, and for research and development for all of them.

Governments have always been behind nuclear power, and by now the industry has become thoroughly entangled with huge private firms like General Electric and Tokyo Electric Power. The political economic inertia, built up over 60 years, is on autopilot — or maybe the cooling system has malfunctioned, whichever technical metaphor you prefer. Utilities bandwagon with a “sure” thing, something that has been done dozens or hundreds of times before, like coal plants or light-water reactors. But wind installations are expanding exponentially. Even the short-term costs of wind and large solar farms is approaching coal in the short-term, and the costs of nuclear plants are expanding at the same rate, kept alive by subsidies from socialists like the Republican Party.

Let us hope that Fukishima’s greatest damage is to the nuclear power industry, and not to Japan and the surrounding regions. And let us hope that nuclear energy is never, ever again, included in a list of clean energies. Nuclear power is over — long live renewable energy!

Can somebody throw a line?Photo: AKZOphoto

In my first post, I started to discuss a speech by the founders of the Breakthrough Institute, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (N and S). In this post, I will discuss their presentation of 12 theses of environmental thought, which they hope will supply “underlying assumptions for a new, post-environmental climate movement.”

1. They start off by claiming that “more, better, or louder climate science will not drive the transformation of the global energy economy.” If this is true, it is indeed tragic. What they seem to be saying is that the public cannot, or will not, deal with a complicated scientific topic, and worse, in my opinion, this public will not be very worried about our long-term future. I do agree with the broad theme of their alternative: appeal to medium-term self-interest, because I think it is eminently possible to tackle global warming by improving people’s lives in that time frame.

2. They advise that “we need to stop trying to scare the pants off of the American public. Doing so has demonstrably backfired.” I’m not sure about this one, partly because I don’t think it’s really been tried. There surely haven’t been any scare campaigns on display recently. And I don’t know how you can show that a few scientists talking about the very real possibility of massive ecological collapse has made much of an impact — unfortunately.

However, they make a point: If you are going to frighten people, you better have a very easy-to-understand and clear set of ideas about how to get out of danger. Humans seem to operate at a high level exactly when they are in danger and there is a clear way out — probably the result of the evolutionary need to do things like escape from lions. But when only fear is used to push your cause, all kinds of unfortunate stresses on the system result, often backfiring and leading to the rise of right-wing political moments. It’s the remedies that have been in short supply so far.

3. N and S argue that “the most successful actions will not be justified for environmental reasons … We should put shared solutions at the center of our politics, not our view of the science.” They use the examples of linking environmental concerns to national security and economic well-being. I would go further and talk about how to build clean infrastructure and thereby reignite the manufacturing engine of growth. Also, solutions to global warming are applicable to addressing the end of the era of cheap oil and the problems associated with collapsing ecosystems and agriculture.

4. N and S don’t think that we should be talking about changing behavior, that the alleged environmentalist consensus to “stop crass consumerism, live in denser cities, and use public transit” will not go over well among most of the world’s population, who live in cities anyway. We can’t expect the world’s population to want to stay mired in less resource-intensive poverty for the sake of preventing global warming.

However, it’s not poor people jammed into megacities that are causing most of the emissions, its rich countries spread out in suburbs and sprawl. But to carry their point to a logical conclusion, it is the refusal of the rich countries to change that will be the deal breaker. And even if by some miracle the rich cut back their profligate ways, “More and more of the world will adopt the very living patterns that greens have so long valorized. And as they do they will use vastly more energy and resources, not less.” Well, then I guess we’re really screwed.

So what is the possible route out? As we shall see, N and S argue that technological innovation is the only answer, because otherwise, they seem to imply, the situation is indeed hopeless.

5. N and S argue that “we have to stop treating climate change as if it were a traditional pollution problem” by using regulation, because the technologies don’t exist to move to a less carbon-emitting world. Implying that solar and wind are not up to the task, they state that a solution to climate change “will require us to rebuild the entire global energy system with technologies that we mostly don’t have today in any form that could conceivably scale to meet that challenge.” But the history of the rollout of electricity and oil were once where renewable energy technologies are now — just starting an exponential take-off. However, their point remains, that we can’t just stop something — fossil fuel emissions — and expect the market to automatically come up with a better alternative.

6. They claim that “We will not regulate or price our way to a clean energy economy” and “Greens have, in recent years, substituted the almighty Market, in the form of a response to a carbon price signal, for their past faith in command and control regulations.” Amen, although I think regulations can go further than they do because technologies do exist that could be used in an effective regulatory environment. And I would also add that public construction is an alternative to trying to develop new technologies (both can happen at the same time).

7. They claim that “we need to acknowledge that the so-called ‘soft energy path’ is a dead end,” where we can meet energy needs through renewable sources and efficiency. There are actually situations in which making or using things more efficiently leads to an increase in the use of a resource (called Jevons’ Paradox). But if resources are recyclable and energy is renewable, that paradox wouldn’t be a big problem.

There has been quite a bit of work done showing that it is possible to generate all of our energy using solar, wind, geothermal, and water energy. I have made the argument, as has Lester Brown, and Greenpeace and others have done impressive studies. N and S call for much more R&D, which should include more money for understanding how current technologies can create a sustainable society now.

8. N and S warn that “we will not internalize the full costs of fossil fuels, even if we are able to agree upon what they actually are.” For instance, some studies claim that gasoline should cost $12 per gallon if all of the health, military, and other effects were accounted for. Judging by the reaction to the oil price spike in the 2008 campaign — drill, baby, drill — I think it unlikely that Americans will accept vastly steeper gasoline and electricity prices.

9. All of the foregoing leads to the conclusion that “There will be no significant action to address global warming, no meaningful caps or other regulatory frameworks, and no global agreement to limit emissions until the alternatives to fossil fuels are much better and cheaper.” I’m not sure where N and S stand on the issue of whether this is the end of the era of cheap oil, that is, that the production of oil is peaking (“peak oil”). Natural gas and coal also have their supply problems; they will not last forever and in fact could become quite problematic in the next decade or so. So if renewables are too expensive now, when fossil fuels become even more expensive, we are in for a bad time.

There is an alternative — use our great wealth, at least while we still have it, to construct a sustainable energy, transportation, and urban infrastructure. We put over one trillion dollars per year into a military system that is, at best, mostly a waste of resources, and we just bailed out a financial system that has run amok. We can certainly afford to build millions of wind turbines and solar panels, even if they are currently more expensive than coal and oil.

10. N and S claim that “There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power.” One could just as easily say that there is no credible path with nuclear power. They have repeatedly stated that renewable energy is impractical. Now they propose an unheard-of expansion of a technology that is much more difficult to construct, constantly runs over-budget, is dependent on a fuel strewn all over the world, and has a host of other problems, like waste disposal, that appear to be insoluble. More research, preferably in different but related technologies like thorium and fusion? Sure. Uranium? 50 years and billions of dollars in R&D is probably enough time and money for a technology to work out its problems.

11. “We will need to embrace again the role of the state as a direct provider of public goods … virtually the entire history of American industrialization and technological innovation is the story of government investments in the development and commercialization of new technologies.” Yes!!

So why is the environmental movement almost completely clueless on this point? Part of it is a reaction to Reagan and the ensuing conservative movement; part of it is the legitimate suspicion of a state apparatus that has made huge missteps (like pushing ethanol); part of it is an understandable desire for decentralized institutions that are more amenable to democratic control. My counterargument is that government is the only institution that can prevent our civilization from suffering the same fate as the Titanic, as difficult as it will be to turn government around from its current course. State-as-builder should at least be one of the options on the table.

12. Finally, I must say they seem to completely cut any ties to the environmental movement with this one: “The solution to the ecological crises wrought by modernity, technology, and progress will be more modernity, technology, and progress. The solutions to the ecological challenges faced by a planet of 6 billion going on 9 billion will not be decentralized energy technologies like solar panels, small scale organic agriculture, and a drawing of unenforceable boundaries around what remains of our ecological inheritance … [the solution] will be: large central station power technologies … further intensification of industrial scale agriculture … and a whole suite of new agricultural, desalinization, and other technologies.” Environmental activists used to call this a “technological fix” — the idea that you can keep the same basic system if only you can replace one technology with another, without redesigning the system as a whole.

Of course, this raises the question of whether technologies will ever be discovered that will allow us to simply pop a new engine into cars, or replace that dirty coal plant with something else. That would be the ideal solution; otherwise, a certain amount of civilizational redesign will be necessary.

But why put all our eggs in a basket that doesn’t even exist yet? I am all for technological innovation, but I don’t want to bet the future of the world’s species on it. At the other extreme, the chances of various technologies coming to fruition are exceedingly small, and therefore maybe we should ignore innovation and get going on what we have now. Or we could cover both bets, by starting seriously — that is, by spending trillions — to rebuild our infrastructure while feverishly researching and developing everything that looks reasonable.

For N and S, “The choice that humanity faces is not whether to constrain our growth, development, and aspirations, or die. It is whether we will continue to innovate and accelerate technological progress in order to thrive.” I wish us luck. But just in case that doesn’t work, I think it’s worthwhile trying to figure out how we could consciously, and with great forethought and democratic participation, start rebuilding civilization right now. An environmentalism based on carbon pricing may be dead, but I’m not worried about the death of environmentalism. I’m worried about the death of the biosphere.

Sign of the times?Photo: Benny Lin

In 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote an essay titled “The Death of Environmentalism” that shook the environmental community — although probably not quite enough. Nordhaus and Shellenberger (N and S) have gone on to form The Breakthrough Institute, arguing that we need technological breakthroughs in order to solve our biggest environmental problem, global warming, as well as advocating for what they see as innovative solutions to various other problems.

They recently gave a follow-up speech at Yale, addressing the epochal questions, “What went wrong with the environmental movement in the past 10 years or so, and what new direction should we take?” I’ve always been interested in what they have to say because I think they have contributed several important new ideas, even though I disagree with some of them. Their critique, at least, presents an opportunity to engage in a meaningful debate about environmental movements and policies. And they serve as a foil for me to pontificate about my own ideas.

N and S start their speech by recalling the genesis of the “Death of Environmentalism,” because, as they say, “Not one of the environmental leaders we interviewed articulated a compelling vision or strategy for dealing with the challenge” of climate change. The environmental movement, broadly defined, was focused — no, obsessed, with — cap-and-trade. In fact, it still is. I have to agree with N and S on this one: The fascination with cap-and-trade has been, perhaps tragically, wrong-headed. If cap-and-trade killed environmentalism, then it is still dead.

It pains me to criticize not just cap-and-trade legislation, but carbon pricing in general (which includes carbon taxes, generally considered an alternative). So much of the energy of the environmental movement is caught up in carbon pricing, and it has spent so many resources, so much time, and so much, as N and S point out, “political capital,” that it is heartbreaking to criticize the sincere work of so many people. The sense I get from my contacts and interaction in the environmental movement — and I include my time blogging for Grist — is that the overwhelming majority of environmentalists think that cap-and-trade (again, including carbon taxes) is the only realistic policy for tackling global warming in time to do anything about it.

This stubbornness is the curse of what John Kenneth Galbraith identified 50 years ago as “conventional wisdom” — that is, a large public spends a considerable amount of time and energy understanding and constructing a self-reinforcing set of ideas, and this group of people is loath to give up their hard-won understanding and consensus. Like a scientific paradigm, people can use this conventional wisdom as a basis for further discussion without going back over first principles and main tenets every time they want to discuss something. This makes policy-making more “efficient,” but can put the group adhering to this set of ideas into a kind of death grip — thus the “death of environmentalism.”

There was another subject matter of N and S’s original essay that I found very important, one that is always difficult for any “single issue” movement, which is this: At some point, it is almost impossible for an agenda to move forward unless that agenda is linked to others. One classic example of this is the path of Martin Luther King, who saw that African Americans, and poor people in general, were never going to thrive economically unless other issues were addressed, such as the struggle of workers to unionize — the effort he was engaged in when he was assassinated — or the resources wasted by a the society that was immersed in the Vietnam War and militarization. It is extremely difficult for movements to move out of the confines of the path in which they have been at least partly successful. The union movement has had the same problem, culminating in the threats to its existence in Wisconsin and elsewhere (the challenge of which will hopefully re-orient the labor movement to a wider embrace of public issues).

In my opinion, we could have had our “Martin Luther King” moment when Al Gore was at the pinnacle of his publicity, after he won the Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth and a Nobel Peace Prize. He had the opportunity to move beyond the same-old-same-old, but instead he gathered $300 million dollars to use in commercials, a strategy I criticized at the time, because he could have much more profitably used that money to organize at the grassroots level. Then he joined a venture capital firm and now he has virtually disappeared from public view.

I’m not saying Gore did not accomplish some very important things, simply that he missed a bigger opportunity. He remained stuck in the conventional wisdom of a carbon price, as did most of the rest of the environmental movement. N and S perhaps lay a little too much emphasis on this grand strategic mistake — the conservative movement and corporate control of government in this country has had a huge impact, for instance. N and S list 12 theses of how to move out of this mess, but before listing them, I’d like to get back to the broader picture of what constitutes successful environmental policy.

The environmental movement was born insisting on regulation — clean up the air and water, prevent companies from polluting, block the rape of the Earth. This regulatory strategy was actually very successful. It would have been a much better way to prevent global warming than the carbon pricing strategy, because we could have just legislated something to the effect that we have to get our electricity and transportation from progressively cleaner and cleaner sources, without the spaghetti logic of carbon pricing.

But there are also limits to regulation. How do you re-center a transportation system on electric trains, instead of cars, trucks, and airplanes, with regulation? The answer is: you can’t. You can’t do it with carbon pricing, either. It requires something that was an integral part of governmental efforts to build the nation, from Lincoln to the New Deal to Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System — that is, the direct intervention of the government into the economy by building infrastructure.

N and S go part of the way toward a government-directed rebuilding program — they advocate for a very large public investment in technological research in the hopes that we can innovate ourselves out of this mess. Politically, it’s much more appealing than carbon pricing, for the simple reason that when you talk about spending money to create something that would make peoples’ lives better, it’s an easier sell than the idea that somehow making things more expensive will make things better — or will prevent things from getting really bad. So N and S are advocating for public investment, which environmentalists have treated as a secondary goal.

There was a slight burst of enthusiasm for “green jobs” on the part of the environmental and labor movements, which N and S see as another failure of environmentalism. The problem was and continues to be that a serious effort to create green jobs and a greener economy requires what the other global centers of manufacturing, Europe, Japan and China, have done. That is, it is necessary to create an industrial policy. The government has intervened, and continues to intervene, in a massive way in those economies to build a new set of industries. Contrary to N and S’s assertion that the green collar sector is low tech, green industries in other manufacturing countries, such as high-speed rail and wind turbines, are very high-tech. After all, the clear economic lesson of the New Deal and World War II is that during an economic downturn, the government should spend more than it takes in. By pursuing an industrial policy that encourages the creation and expansion of cutting-edge industries, like wind and high-speed rail, we could learn from the short-term Keynesian lessons of the New Deal while at the same time increasing the long-term competitiveness of the United States. It would be a win-win policy.

Read on to part two.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz.Photo: Andrew Newton

Recently Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prize-winning economist and senior fellow and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute, gave a very interesting speech in South Africa concerning climate change and the global economy. He argued that by implementing policies that help to reverse global warming, we can also reverse the global economic downturn. Although he also pointed out many barriers to doing so, he outlined some interesting policy proposals.

For me, the most interesting part of his speech concerned the use of a Keynesian approach, not just for a single country, as is usually done, but for the entire world economy. John Maynard Keynes pointed out that when the private sector is unable to generate enough demand in the economy, that is, it is unable generate enough spending from consumption and investment, then the government must step in to kickstart spending. Thus in recessions and depressions many now acknowledge that at some point it may be necessary for the government to spend more than it takes in to get the economy moving again. (See numerous articles from Marshall Auerback on this basic idea.)

There are a couple of fine points to what Keynes was saying, however, that are either often glossed over or challenged. First, he asserted that when demand is low, saving can get in the way of recovery. So — and this is the part that is ignored — since the rich save more than the poor, their excess income gets in the way of recovery. The horrendous implication, from the rich person’s point of view, is that they should be taxed more. The less direct way to put this, which is the way it is discussed even in much of the progressive media, is that an “unequal distribution of wealth” leads to negative economic outcomes. The important statistic for the U.S. is that while in 1970 the top 1 percent of households pulled in about 10 percent of total income, now they receive close to 25 percent. Not good, from a purely Keynesian perspective.

So what does this have to do with climate change? Since he was speaking in South Africa, it was easy for him to point out that the world distribution of wealth is very unequal. Because of this inequality, it will be much harder for developing countries to create less carbon-intensive economies through large-scale investment than for developed countries. In addition, the poorer countries consume more and the richer countries save more. So an obvious policy approach is to tax financial transactions, which moves money from something that (to be charitable) involves savings into consumption and investment by developing countries. The richer countries could also simply give grants to the poorer countries. Stiglitz claimed that about $200 billion per year would be required to help developing countries make the transition to a less carbon-intensive future, which could be financed from a financial tax.

The second implication of Keynes’ ideas is that the economy needs more investment when it is in a downturn. We certainly need a good deal of investment to create less carbon-intensive economies, and it so happens that, according to Keynes, investment, particularly in factories, is the best way to pull economies out of slumps. While he famously suggested that digging holes and filling them up again would also do the trick, he clearly preferred doing something useful with investments on the grounds that investment is generally good for a society and that it is a surer way to speed recovery than consumption.

Stiglitz argued that what we have now is an inadequate level of global aggregate demand, which is to say, there isn’t enough consumption and investment for the entire global economy to pull out of the recession. Thus, he stressed, reversing climate change is an opportunity for the economy, not a drag. We need investment for the good of the climate and we need investment for the good of the economy — therefore what we have is a win-win situation.

But how do we encourage investment? Stiglitz’s answer is to put a price on the emission of carbon, thus stimulating investment into less carbon-intensive technologies. He thinks that eventually carbon will be priced at 80 dollars per ton, which means that it will probably be cheaper to build a wind farm than to build a coal plant. In fact, it might become more economically rational, with a price on carbon, to shut down an existing coal plant and build a new wind farm to replace it. And new wind farms mean new investment, which means increasing global aggregate demand, which means pulling out of the global recession.

Of course, there are roadblocks in the way of this process. For one thing, there is the power of the greatest emitters of carbon, the oil and coal industries, among others. Then there is the expense that a price on carbon would mean for poorer countries — thus the need for the richer part of the world to subsidize the poorer part. Even rich countries, of course, would not take easily to a price for carbon, as we saw in last year’s defeat of lukewarm cap-and-trade legislation. Stiglitz argues that for an international treaty to be effective, it needs to have enforceable sanctions, such as hitting the offending nation’s exports with a price increase. But as the managing editor of South Africa’s largest newspaper argued in a generally favorable response to Stiglitz’s lecture, trade sanctions would mean that developing countries would be hurt, thus requiring some more subsidies in order to equalize the playing field.

In all, I think Stiglitz laid out the foundation of a very workable global economic strategy. I would propose another element: encouraging direct investment and construction of infrastructure on the part of governments. While Stiglitz mentioned the idea of regulation and praised mass transit as an adjunct to the general policy of pricing carbon, it was not a focus of his approach. But here is another possibility for a win-win — if developed countries sold or gave factories to the developing countries to create the wind turbines, electric rail and cars, and solar plants that would allow them to reduce carbon emissions, it would give the developed countries a huge boost economically and the developing countries the capability to become much wealthier in a sustainable way. Think of it as a global Marshall Plan or Works Progress Administration. The developed countries could promise, say, $1 trillion per year in machinery to the developing countries, which would be a strategic, targeted, Keynesian method for pulling the entire world economy out of its slump. And it would go far to meet what Stiglitz called the greatest challenge we have ever faced: the threat of global clima
te change.

A holistic, renewable electricity system would generate millions of good jobs.

When the Roosevelt Administration designed the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), it was designed as a set of mutually self-reinforcing parts, as a holistic system — including electrification, flood control, soil conservation, fertilizer production, and plenty of good, long-term jobs. The same concept of mutual gain applies to renewable energy — at a regional, and even national level, an economy running on solar, wind, and geothermal energy would constitute a system, creating more than the sum of its parts.

By building dams, the TVA both controlled floods and provided electricity. By teaching farmers about soil erosion and good soil conservation practices, rains stopped turning into the floods that occur when soil is poorly maintained. By controlling floods, agriculture became more dependable, and it became possible to set up industries such as fertilizer manufacture, whose output was then used to strengthen the farming economy. With a strong farming system, the commercial sector expanded, using the electricity provided by the dams — which were made more reliable because there was less flooding. These relationships are examples of positive feedback loops, that is, by increasing something (like electricity) you increase something else (like manufacturing) that then loops back to increase the first set of factors (in this case, by enriching the region).

In just the same way, by designing a national wind, solar, and geothermal system, the benefits of each individual piece of equipment are increased, and those benefits reverberate within the wider economy, looping back to support the renewable system. One of the common criticisms of renewable energy is that it is intermittent — that is, the wind doesn’t always blow, and at night the sun doesn’t shine. However, as Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford University has been arguing, since the wind is always blowing someplace in the continental United States, if you design a regional or even national system that places wind turbines in areas with different wind patterns, the output of power becomes reliable. In fact, an interconnected system could provide at least 33 percent of a wind system as baseload power, that is, you would be confident that at least one third of your power needs were provided for by wind, a function now filled by coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy.

But wind could be just one part of a national renewable energy system. Concentrated solar power (CSP), uses large arrays of mirrors (mostly in the desert) to concentrate energy on a tower that then creates steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. The big advantage of CSP is that it can store much of this heat in things like molten salt. At night the CSP plant can use that heat to continue to generate electricity. As Joe Romm points out in an article about CSP, “Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States.” Paired with an Interstate Wind System, the benefits would probably increase — by the time the stored heat in a CSP ran out, it would be late enough at night that the wind system could provide all of the remaining electric needs of the country.

There are other storage technologies that could banish intermittency. The sodium-sulfur battery, which can be the size of a house, could be used to store excess energy if too much wind is blowing, or to store electricity for times when the wind isn’t blowing enough. There are newer sodium-sulfur batteries that are more appropriate for storage at the building level, adding a whole new level of flexibility to a national renewable system.

Now add solar panels and solar hot water heaters on top of buildings to the national design. Make those buildings more and more energy-sipping by retrofitting them to retain heat in the winter and cool air in the summer, and we make the system even more resilient. Solar panels and hot water heaters are most efficient at the height of the day, when air conditioning needs often bog down an entire electric system (and can sometimes lead to blackouts). Much of the current electric system is composed of what is known as peak load generators, usually fueled by natural gas. By using solar panels and hot water heaters, and insulating buildings, we could eventually replace “peak” generators — but only if decentralized building energy systems are combined with a national system, one centered on technologies such as wind and CSP.

Building-based geothermal energy can also add to the virtuous cycles within a renewable energy system. The least well-known clean energy source, geothermal heat pumps (GHP), use the fact that the temperature of the ground, even 10 feet deep, stays at a constant temperature of 50 to 60 degrees throughout the year. Since heating the air and water in buildings uses about one-third of both our electricity and natural gas, and since coal-fired plants provide 50 percent of our electricity, we could shut down all of our coal plants simply by installing GHPs under all of our buildings to fulfill their heating and cooling needs.

But of course we don’t have to rely on any single renewable technology to make our electrical system carbon-and-pollution-free. The beauty of wind, solar, and geothermal, used together, is that each one complements the other. Wind can provide a baseload, constant supply, while geothermal heat pumps and solar water heaters can decrease the need for that baseload power. CSP can help in the most energy-intensive part of the day, while solar panels and efficient buildings can be used to take the “peak” out of “peak power”. Large batteries and CSP heat storage can be used to smooth out any remaining problems with intermittency.

The final piece of the renewable puzzle is to create a national system to transmit clean electricity from one coast to the other. Currently, our national electric grid is in mis
erable shape; but Portugal just rebuilt their electric grid to accommodate renewable electricity — so why can’t we?

Obviously, we have a challenging political environment, to say the least. Roosevelt wanted to establish an entire network of regional authorities around the country, modeled on the TVA, and he couldn’t prevail in Congress. But we have to start somewhere, and the place to start is to at least understand and have a public conversation about the potentialities of a holistic, renewable electricity system. I’d bet that wide public interest in a program that would generate millions of new, good jobs, and provide reliable clean electricity, would be something that could change political calculations in a hurry.

Can we change our ways? Ditch the cars and move towards a greener approach to transportation.Photo courtesy of leelefever via flickr

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

Americans have always been known to have a “can-do” spirit. During the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration tried out many different programs to confront the Great Depression and to spread rural electrification and support agriculture. Nowadays, however, much of the political spectrum seems to have turned to a “can’t do” spirit.

The sequence is often the following: Left-of-center ideas are proposed to solve some long-term, gigantic problem. The Right says that the government can’t implement the idea because if the market had liked the idea it would have happened, and since the market didn’t do it … it can’t be done. The center-right looks at the world as it currently is, notes the Right’s reaction to the Left, and then, with furrowed-brow and a studied look of being “realistic,” announces that the progressives proposals are … can’t do.

A prime example of this “realistic” impulse can be found on display in an article by Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, entitled “Goodbye, Bullet Trains and Wind Mills.” Even though high-speed rail and wind farms are expanding at prodigious rates around the globe, in the U.S., it’s all “no we can’t.” While it would take a longer article than his to challenge all of Lind’s factual inaccuracies, let me concentrate on a few of the larger errors of his ways.

First, he invents the strawmen of “greens” who hate cars, and “urbanists” who despise suburbs, who have somehow hijacked that repository of caution and timidity, the Democratic Party. In real “reality,” most greens live in suburbs and drive cars, simply because most Americans do.

In my experience, environmentalists are scared to even mention alternatives to car travel, lest potential supporters run away in panic. Anybody who dares to raise a voice for designing walkable neighborhoods does so in the most hushed tones. Besides James Howard Kunstler, I’m not sure who Lind is talking about (Disclosure: I don’t have a driver’s license and I prefer Manhattan-style neighborhoods).

Meanwhile, the allegedly brainwashed Democratic Party continues to support many times more funding for highways than for transit, continuing the trend between 1978 and 1999 when half of all transportation money went to highways, and 15 percent to rail and transit; meanwhile, one of the few items in Obama’s 2011 budget that declines is funding for rail.

Second, Lind argues that because we don’t currently have high-speed rail and a significant percentage of our electricity generated from wind power, it won’t ever happen. What would he have said in 1900? There were 4,000 cars made that year, and 6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. Now we have about 250 million cars and 4,000 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.

In the 1950s and 1960s, we spent over $400 billion in current dollars to construct probably the largest “socialist” project in world history, the Interstate Highway System. The U.S. High-Speed Rail Association estimates that it would cost about $600 billion to build a 17,000 mile system in 20 years. The same sum would build a large chunk of a continent-spanning wind network that would take advantage of the fact that wind is always blowing somewhere. We spent decades and trillions of dollars building the suburbs; why can’t we do the same to build up dense, walkable cities and towns? Why is something possible in the past, but not in the future?

Third, Lind proposes an alternative — more of the same. More nuclear power plants, more highways for more trucks, more airports, more asphalt and concrete, more natural gas, and apparently, more sprawl (Lind’s colleague at New America Foundation, the oil expert Lisa Margonelli, doesn’t do much better).

Since Lind dissed rail by proclaiming that it is oh-so-19th century, it might surprise readers to know that the most recent development in transportation technology has been high-speed rail. Cars and trucks predate diesel locomotives; electrified freight rail is more than 10 times more efficient than trucks. An efficient car wastes 99 percent of its energy, using only 1 percent to actually move the human occupants. And Lind doesn’t even consider looming, permanent price increases in oil as it becomes harder and harder to find more oil — even in places one mile under the Gulf of Mexico.

However, I agree with Lind in one area — we need “more government spending for years to come,” and “massive public investment in infrastructure that increases long-term U.S. economic growth.” That’s exactly what a multi-trillion dollar, multi-decade program of building high-speed rail, intra-city rail such as trolleys and subways, wind farms across the country and off-shore, and myriad other renewable energy and rail-based projects, would accomplish. These systems use all parts of the core of a modern industrial system — machine tools, semiconductors, high-skill labor, advanced materials, cutting-edge engineering, and more.

I like to think that if the New Dealers were around today, they would agree that we can do it, yes we can!

Seventh, the global agricultural system is coming unglued. The days of transporting food over thousands of miles, of dousing soils with pesticides and artificial fertilizers, and of growing thousands of acres of the same crop, will soon draw to a close. Millions of new urban gardening jobs could be created within cities and suburbs in order to produce most of our fruits and vegetables, and most grain could be grown close to urban areas. This kind of agriculture will build up the soil, which is the natural capital of our farming system, instead of letting it be destroyed and washed away (two examples of sustainable agricultural practices are permaculture and bio-intensive gardening).

A soil-enhancing, pesticide- and artificial fertilizer-free agriculture would be much more labor-intensive than the current system. Industrial agriculture is only productive because of the indiscriminate use of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. Organic, intensive agriculture is more productive in terms of land, but requires high skill levels and more labor.

Training Institutes could help new gardener/farmers to produce healthy, sustainable food, and the Bank could be used to help them set up a new garden/farm. The American agricultural workforce could balloon from the current 1 million to many millions, making it one of the most effective green-collar jobs possible.

Agriculture, like transportation, building construction and energy, could stop being a source of crisis and start becoming a source of sustainability.

Eighth, our economy teeters on the edge of a cliff, at least partly caused by the decline of the manufacturing sector. But the various programs advocated in this chapter all rely on a healthy manufacturing sector to produce the trains, wind turbines, solar panels, zero emission buildings, organic gardens and more that are needed to decrease carbon emissions and avoid the wholesale destruction of the biosphere. Thus, in order to create a sustainable society and guarantee our economic well-being, it is imperative that the federal government act to support the revival of the manufacturing sector.

The Infrastructure Capital Development Bank could include a national system of manufacturing extension services, which would help start and expand manufacturing firms to provide the sinews of the green economy. The extension services could also start an epochal shift, from manufacturing which uses up the Earth’s resources and pollutes our ecosystems, to a manufacturing system that is “cradle to cradle“—that is, that uses recycled materials and creates zero pollution. If this shift happens, all manufacturing, for the first time in human history, could be sustainable and all manufacturing workers would be blue-green-collar.

Manufacturing is not simply a source of jobs, it is a critical part of any prosperous society. Even the capacity to trade for manufactured goods requires a thriving manufacturing sector. According to the WTO[PDF], only 20 percent of the trade among the regions of the world is in services; the rest is in merchandise. So, even though 65 percent of the U.S. economy is part of the nongovernmental service economy, most of that output cannot be traded for foreign manufacturing goods. Indeed, the U.S. trade deficit that threatens the value of the dollar cannot be closed unless manufacturing activity is increased.

This imbalance occurs because services usually involve the act of using manufactured goods, which can only be done on-site. Thus, a solar panel is installed and maintained by service personnel; a salesperson might sell the panel to the homeowner after he/she saw an advertisement; a trucker might bring the panel to the home after various office services such as accounting have been involved. All of these services added together might yield many more jobs and much more economic activity than the manufacture of the solar panels in the first place. But the services are all dependent on the manufactured solar panels, and technological advances in the manufacture of the solar panels can have large effects on the employment possibilities of the industry.

Manufacturing the solar panels also brings about the need for services at various stages of the production process, such as in research, design and marketing. Most importantly, however, the solar panels themselves are built with parts that have been produced using industrial machinery. These various kinds of industrial machinery, such as machine tools or silicon-purification equipment, have their own “ecosystems” of services and manufacturing attached to them. And this industrial machinery has a unique aspect: It can be used for all manufacturing industries, which in their turn spawn the rest of the services that make up the economy.

Thus, manufacturing solar panels not only makes the various service jobs such as installation possible, it also provides a market for the very core of the economic ecosystem: The various industrial machineries that in turn are used to produce the goods and services that power the entire economy.

Now consider how this process takes place when making wind turbines, trains, building materials, geothermal heat pumps or gardening tools. Not only are the millions of service jobs associated with these technologies expanded as green industries grow, the entire industrial machinery core of the system could be rebuilt in the United States. This provides a short-term boost to the economy, but more importantly, it creates the long-term foundation of economic reconstruction that can help rebuild the middle class, move people out of poverty and create a prosperous society for the foreseeable future.

In sum, a green-collar jobs program can achieve a carbon-free inter-city and intra-city transportation system supported by walkable urbanism, a carbon-free energy system based on buildings, metropolitan areas and a national grid, and a sustainable agricultural and manufacturing system. New federal policies can move us, now, in the direction of a society in which all jobs are green-collar.

Tomorrow, April 20th, I and over 200 other people around the country and from several countries will be fasting. We’ll be doing so to make a statement that it is long overdue that this country gets on the right side, gives concrete leadership, to the wide and deep clean energy revolution that is absolutely essential, and soon, if we’re to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. 

We’re doing this tomorrow because this is the day that the U.S. Congress returns from its spring recess. This week hearings will begin on a recently-released draft piece of climate legislation, the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” in the key House Energy and Commerce Committee chaired by Henry Waxman. Over the next month it is expected that this committee will amend and vote on a final bill to send to the full House, which will then likely vote on it in June. 

About a third of those fasting tomorrow will fast more than this one day. 15 people, myself included, are planning to fast 25-40 days or more: Jere Locke, Diane Wilson, Elliott Adams, Diane Lopez Hughes, Portia Odell, Cathy Luna, Juliana Lindh, Amy Lane, Steve Larrick, Vincent Pawlowski, Hetesh Patel, Howard Pederson, Sedinan Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry and, in Australia, Gary Stuard. 

Why 25-40 days or more? Because we want to call attention to the need for the U.S. and other industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 (35-50% below today’s levels). This is a target adopted by climate negotiators from the nations of the world at a United Nations climate conference in Bali, Indonesia in December, 2007. It is a target that, if reached, would give the world some chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. 

Our other major demands are for a moratorium on the building of any new coal plants and that there should be no giveaways to polluters in the climate legislation being drafted. As President Obama called for in his campaign and in his budget proposal to Congress less than two months ago, 100% of the permits to pollute under a carbon cap must be auctioned, or a substantial carbon fee must be enacted, to ensure that the shift from fossil fuels to renewables, efficiency and earth-friendly lifestyles happens rapidly. 

In the context of what the world’s scientists are telling us about what is happening to our natural environment, these are not radical demands. They could be criticized as not being strong enough. I have heard from several people, for example, asking why we are not calling for what Al Gore has put forward: 100% clean electricity in the USA, essentially renewables, within 10 years, by 2018.  

I love this demand, and there’s no question in my mind that it could be done if the political will to get it done existed within the U.S., particularly within the White House and Congress. But we’re nowhere close to that right now. Right now, Big Oil and King Coal have tremendous influence over Congress, at the same time that our newly-elected President continues to talk about “clean coal” as if it actually exists, which it doesn’t and never will. 

We can see the polluters’ power by what is happening with the 648-page “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.” Although there are certainly good parts to this bill, particularly its provisions in support of renewable energy, energy efficiency and taking action to prevent deforestation, there are a lot of bad parts. Chief among them is the provision for a tremendous number of problematic offsets. “Offsets” are how polluters can continue polluting while giving some financial support to supposed clean energy or energy efficiency projects somewhere else in the world other than where their own company is polluting. Experience with offsets within the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union carbon-trading system shows that many of them are fake, and many of them are socially unjust.  

And over the last week or so it has become clear that, as of right now, the plan is to give away as many as 50%, maybe more, of the permits to burn carbon-based fuels to coal-burning utilities and other carbon emitters. This is truly outrageous. 

These two provisions, for “offsets” and for giving free permits to polluters, would completely undercut the on-paper emission reduction targets under the cap of 7% below 1990 levels by 2020 (20% below current levels) and 80% below current levels by 2050. The 2020 reduction target is too low to begin with, conflicting with what the science says is necessary. 

What will environmental, climate and progressive groups do about this looming debacle? 

Some are working on two tracks. One is to do whatever can be done to mobilize grassroots pressure on House members to significantly correct and strengthen the Waxman committee bill. The other is to support a much simpler, more straightforward, fair and just approach to how we reduce carbon emissions: either a tax (or carbon fee) and dividend (www.carbontax.org) or cap and dividend (www.capanddividend.org). The House Ways and Means Committee has been seriously discussing these alternative approaches for the last couple of months and should be taking them up again when they return this week. 

Peter Barnes, the originator and tireless advocate for years of the cap and dividend approach, wrote a few days ago (http://www.grist.org/article/why-two-climate-bills-are-better-than-one) about what is happening and what those who understand how serious our climate crisis is should be supporting:   

“At the moment, there is heavy pressure from many quarters to abort the Ways and Means Committee’s work.  The party line is that two bills would be a distraction, and that everyone needs to get behind the Waxman bill, whatever it turns out to be.  In my view, this ‘my way or the highway’ approach is ill-advised.  It is too soon to shut down a wider discussion of carbon pricing, and too soon to eliminate alternatives.  The time will come when that discussion must end and a choice must be made, but that time is not yet. 

“The approaches being considered by the two committees are significantly different.  One would create a complex, opaque system that favors politically powerful corporations, the other would create a simple, transparent system that returns higher prices directly to the people.  It is a GOOD THING for Congress and the public to know that these two approaches are possible, and to discuss them for a while. Snuffing out that discussion before it happens would be a disservice to the democratic process, and ultimately to finding a durable climate solution.” 

This is logical. It is common sense. It is a democratic approach. But the question remains: what will environmental and other groups do this week and next, over the next month? Will they bend to the political science of “Washington,” or will they speak out clearly and act as the climate science is telling us to act?  

One way or the other, the decisions they make will be historic. For myself and my fellow fasters, we will be praying in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi that most of them, that most of us, will do the right thing.

More information on the “25-40 fast” and what you can do right now, whether fasting or not, can be found at www.fastingforourfuture.org.